I just recently installed Gentoo 1.4 for SPARC using a 1.4_rc4 LiveCD (sparc32) on my SparcStation 5 (110 MHz - 64 Mb RAM - 2x9Gb drives). It boots up and looks great until I throw a heavy emerge at it. During the build/install from the LiveCD there were no such problems.

It has an sbus QFE card in addition to the on board 10Mbit Sun Lance interface.

I've compiled a new 2.4.21-sparc-r1 kernel with ip_tables (my intent is to make this puppy a firewall at some point), but until then I'm going to use it as a workstation.

After all was done building and installing with the LiveCD, I could reboot and load the new kernel from disk without a problem (well, except for a problem loading the key mappings, but I'll fix that separately). I then tried to 'emerge xfree' and about 90% of the way through it (it was at the last package -- xfree), the machine froze solid with

Subsequent reboots and retries haven't gotten me much further. The box kernel panics randomly at this point -- sometimes I can go a whole session with no problem as long as I don't try anything labor intensive and other times it'll panic relatively quickly. I can always reproduce it when attempting to emerge xfree though -- it panics right when it tries to unpack all of the source.

Here's an update: I fixed the keymap loading issue by placing the full path to the keymapping file in /etc/rc.conf:

Code:

KEYMAP="/usr/share/keymaps/sun/sunkeymap.map.gz"

All is cool on that front after a restart.

Just for kicks, I kicked off an 'emerge xfree' and it is still compiling without a kernel panic. Could something as simple as the keymap fix this? Has anyone else had this come up? I'm keeping a close eye on it for now and will update if it panics again..._________________-H0bb3z-
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Intel QX9770 | 6Gb DDR3 | ATI 4870 HD 1Gb | 2xSeagate 1Tb SATAs
Running Funtoo Core2 build

Ok I though you solved it, but apparently not, I had the same problem with 4 different boxes, and apparently noone else seems to be able to reproduce it. So I tried to compile my kernel with gcc3.2.x and thing are much better now.

Sorry for bringing this back up -- it appears after booting from the LiveCD, running an rsync and emerging everything I needed, the system is stable. I was previously already running gcc3.2+...

From the LiveCD, I was able to rebuild the kernel, get X up and running with Fluxbox, etc. I've since run rsync, rebuilt the kernel a couple times and emerged iptables and fwbuilder without any kernel panics without booting with the LiveCD.

Now I'm trying to figure out what's up with my SBUS QFE interfaces, but that's another topic...
EDIT: I found this thread: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=80772 that states the same symptoms I'm having, so I think I'll be able to fix the QFE inturrupt issues by remapping my prom via nvramrc...